This guide from Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP(R)) covers safeguards that can be implemented in hospitality businesses today, tips on how to continuously improve security and data regulation compliance.

HFTP GDPR Guidelines: Privacy Policies for Hotels

This document offers points to consider in the development of a hotel’s privacy policy. In view of the multiple organisational and legal structures under which hotels operate, as well as the complexity of the third party landscape that may be part of the complete guest experience, this document serves as a guideline only.

HFTP GDPR Guidelines: Hospitality Guest Registration Cards

This document offers recommendations for guest information collection on the guest registration card along with consent for use. It can be used as a guideline for loyalty cards, health data, export of data outside of the EU, privacy policies and direct marketing.

A big part of your online identity will soon be transferable across multiple providers. It’s by far one of the most profound impacts of the GDPR on our digital lives and on our digital freedom of movement. As these data transfer requests become more and more common, companies will necessarily want to minimize the effort it takes to comply. The only logical thing to do to avoid having to convert data into each provider’s format is to eventually agree on standardized formats for personal data and APIs used to access them. Our messages, social networks, location data, images, purchase history, music listening history and everything else will become standardized, just like our email or calendars have been for decades.

The travel sector must be more aggressive on mobile which has fragmented the customer journey, Facebook told last week Phocuswright Europe conference in Amsterdam.
Nikhilesh Ponde, the social media giant’s head of global travel strategies, said while travel as a sector has adapted well to the digital age it faces challenges.

Many companies, acting based on poor legal advice, a fear of fines of up to €20m and a lack of good examples to follow, have taken what they see as the safest option for hewing to the GDPR: asking customers to renew their consent for marketing communications and data processing.
But Toni Vitale, the head of regulation, data and information at the law firm Winckworth Sherwood, said many of those requests would be needless paperwork, and some that were not would be illegal.

Google has made some significant changes in the area of local search. Today, Google search is less about displaying organic web page results and more about featuring Google products.
We are seeing result pages where Google features occupied virtually the entire page and organic web page results were barely visible.

The explosive rise of short-stay Airbnb holiday rentals may be shutting locals out of housing and changing neighbourhoods across Europe, but cities’ efforts to halt it are being stymied by EU policies to promote the “sharing economy”, campaigners say.

For travel marketers who have never heard of Douyin, chances are that their marketing strategies targeting the Chinese millennials are already falling behind, said industry players at a panel discussion at ITB China 2018 in Shanghai.

With a demanding clientele and the tech-savviness of the millennial generation, hotels across APAC are discovering that phone reservations and a friendly concierge go only so far in surprising and delighting their guests.

Marketers hoping to lure consumers to social media need to craft unique, experience-driven campaigns around their travel products, as most travelers still rely on search engines, like Google, to inform their travel decisions and purchases.

Even as competition intensifies for big-spending cardholders with rewards lust in their hearts, spending on the Delta Amex cards rose at a compound annual growth rate of 12 percent from 2013 through 2017.

The head of France at SiteMinder is alerting the country’s hotels to a slowing growth rate of direct online bookings, exposing French hotels to a future of distant relationships with their guests and guest experiences that are lacking in personalisation.

Over the past two years, travel start-ups raised a cumulative US$30 billion in funding - almost totaling the amount raised over the past 10 years. The potential for one of these companies to completely change industry dynamics is likely not a matter of if, but a matter of when.

Travelport has slowly but consistently lost market share since 2006. Initially, Amadeus was the primary beneficiary, but more recently both Sabre and Amadeus have been benefiting from Travelport’s decline.

Business travelers have no preference whether they deal with a chatbot or a human when making bookings, new research suggests.
Booking.com for Business also found that 80% of respondents to its survey favoured self-service methods of booking travel.

Reviewers will receive an email notification when a business responds. Google also plans to add mobile push notifications at a later date.
Google announced both on Twitter and in its forums that it will notify customers or users who leave reviews on Google Local results after owners respond to their reviews.

The start-up uses AI to give location and neighbourhood information during the hotel search and discovery process of travel booking.
Trivago says the acquisition follows its “continued efforts to improve the traveller search experience” by giving personalised results through technology and product innovation.

Holidays have always been at the heart of social media. But now the platforms have quietly infiltrated another side of holidays: how we book them.
Last week Instagram unveiled a new action button, making it easier for its 800 million users to book tickets and holidays through the app.

Last week, Google announced a new version of Google Maps that will launch later this summer, with a new set of features that are all about exploration.
“About a year ago, when we started to talk to users, one of the things we asked them was: how can we really help you? What else do you want Google Maps to do? And one of the overwhelming answers that we got back was just really a lot of requests around helping users explore an area, help me decide where to go,” Sophia Lin, Google’s senior product manager on the Google Maps team, told me. “So we really started digging in to thinking about what we can really do here from Google that would really help people.”

Google just showed a crazy (and terrifying) new feature for the Google Assistant at its I/O developer conference: The Assistant will soon be able make calls for you to make a table reservation at a restaurant that doesn’t take online bookings.

In an effort to boost its presence in the business realm, Instagram unveiled new features on the social networking platform that will help users contact companies and enlist them for goods and services.
The tools launched on Tuesday also enhance companies’ visibility on Instagram. The company said 200 million active Instagrammers visit a business profile each day.

For the unsuspecting travel consumer the new ad format will likely capture attention and drive more bookings. For the careless hotel it could result in more OTA bookings off its own marketing efforts.
TripAdvisor recently launched a new ad format called Sponsored Placements. Now on the destination results page a sponsored (paid) ad gives the hotel advertiser first position in the listing results.